98.

It often happens that I'm wrong. It happened with Shaha Ali Riza (not the man-baiting monetary policy minx I painted her to be), it happened recently with rape (turns out that does occur in the animal kingdom but that's not my point) and it happened even more recently when I wrote about men being more visual than women. I was obviously talking about sex, not fashion.

Turns out, there might be some truth to this theory. I use the word "truth" because what I mean is...

I had the chance today to hear a speech by transsexual researcher Anne Lawrence (not to be mistaken, as I first did, for Anne Summers, manufacturer of the infamous "rabbit" vibrator which I find, actually, somewhat intimidating but that's not relevant). In addition to being incredibly honest and personable, Lawrence painted her transsexuality as what it is: a disorienting form of mental illness. (I know people elsewhere might go apeshit over this, but let's not split hairs: when you pay a doctor the equivalent of a Gambian village's annual wages to slice open your genitals, you're not a happy camper. And there are different forms of transsexuality, not all of which constitute an illness). Not to be confused with transvestitism, which is a lifestyle choice.

Lawrence's description of being unable to achieve real intimacy with sexual partners was heartbreaking, and in a way rang strangely true. I think one symptom that is constant across mental disorders is this feeling of "separation" - of distance from and disappointment in other people, particularly intimate partners. I've seen this distance portrayed so well in Ernest Hemingway's short story "Up in Michigan" and I know that Hemingway was an alcoholic, severely depressed, and a lifelong cross-dresser. I saw this distance again in Lawrence.

It surprises me how many normal people have problems being close to other people. It doesn't matter how much you want it - your own chemistry/history can stop you. It's sad, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But all this is not my point.

My point is a little lighter, so I'm going to shift gears. Lawrence said that she misses only two things about being a man. The first is having effortless strength - she can't run a mile as fast, she can't lift heavy things, she can't do things that her body previously took for granted.

The second is her sex drive. As a natal man with no male organs, Lawrence has less testosterone than the average woman, and she said, "I didn't realize until my surgery how much testosterone is the hormone that drives lust." She said she missed her instinctive physical reactions when attractive women walked by (she's still attracted to women, although not as strongly) and what she referred to as her "constant, easy physical drive" and her "desperate need to have orgasms."

Ok. So. I'm not trying to generalize here. Obviously not everyone feels they have a "constant, easy physical drive": and if all sexuality were this angst-free, Portnoy would have had nothing to complain about. But I do think that being able to want other people - on a visceral level - is a marker of being alive.

Also, I think these two things that Lawrence named are things that women - whether we admit it or not - like about men, maybe because we realize that they're different.

95.

The problem with taking a class on human sexuality isn't that it's awkward. It's that sometimes, you will read things that, for whatever reason, seem intrinsically wrong.

For example, in the introduction to my textbook, the author cites a study that concludes, "By committing rape, men could have extra offspring at little cost, thus perpetuating more copies of their genes. Women, on the other hand, were limited in the total number of offspring they could have and could easily reach that number without engaging in rape. Therefore, the thinking goes, genes conferring the capacity for rape on men (and men only) spread throughout the human species."

How can someone apologize for rape on the basis of biology? But more importantly, how can they be so wrong? I feel that sometimes people refer to their "animal instincts" when they mean "my worse self." But in most species, females are the sexual decision-makers. I'm thinking about all those Animal Planet videos where a male lion tries to get it on with a female lion, and she doesn't dig it, so she claws him in the face and he skulks off. Something like that. The point is, rape does not exist in the animal kingdom.

This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a fact. And if rape were an evolutionary advantage, why wouldn't it be the norm? After all, many species are better at reproducing than humans (humans, in fact, reproduce poorly. What we do well is eliminate predators.) Why is this? Lots of theories might exist, but the most obvious is that it's not always advantageous for a female to be pregnant. The other might be that rape - overall, a violent act - is both physically and mentally damaging. Not only is it less likely to produce offspring, it's more likely to leave damages that will complicate pregnancy, etc, etc, etc.

And it's not as if most rapes progress like normal sex, anyway. In general, in fact, rape prevents pregnancy by damaging the woman. And I'm not just talking about the Congo, either. At the risk of being really indelicate, it seems that in most species males are conditioned to respond to signs of a female being "in heat" (not a charming expression) but, anyway, she'll enjoy it.

Why am I even bothering with all this, since the majority of people aren't rapists and the few who are can't be reasoned out of it? And why does any of it matter? I guess because rape is already such a loaded term on most college campuses, and I wonder sometimes if it doesn't do more harm than good to expose people to science based on faulty assumptions (women can have all the offspring they want without resorting to rape? Maybe some women can, just like some men, but how can someone make such a sensitive conclusion based on such a broad generalization?)

But, in the grander scheme of things, what is becoming far too clear is that most studies about human sexuality are "quack science" - hopelessly lopsided, poorly executed, and inconsistently robust in their conclusions. Not once have we come across results that, examined in the light of statistics, come up significant time after time.

What a raft of bullshit this class is turning out to be.

92. Who Wears Short Pants?

So Times writer Caitlin Moran wrote a very entertaining piece the other day about "pantorexia:" which she terms women's addiction to tiny and impractical underpants. (Imagine this entire post being read in a British accent, that will make the subject sound much less indelicate.)

Moran is a "woman of a certain age" which is the Edwardian way of saying "older than me." I find that despite their arguments in favor of practicality, safety, etc, women like Moran see the whole dental-floss-thong phenomenon as part of the Britnification of pop culture. In other words, as a cultural scourge. Victoria may once have had a secret, but she certainly doesn't anymore.

I've been doing my own laundry since I was 15, but not because I'm all that industrious. I started doing my own laundry around the time I started buying my own underwear, and the two were not unrelated. Even now, if for any reason (packing, unpacking, carrying laundry into the basement) my mother catches sight of some of the things I've bought lately, she makes a funny little face. The other day, when we were discussing how some of my laundry had ended up mixed with hers and my sisters, she deadpanned, "it's not like I'd get confused what belonged to whom. Anything smaller than 4 centimeters is yours."

She's wrong of course - it's more like 8 centimeters.

She cites the same argument as Moran, which is that "tiny knickers" are impractical. But I think it's more than that. In her steadfastly conservative heart (and it is conservative, in spite of all her attempts to appear very liberal) my mother thinks pretty underwear is morally wrong. Or at least, indicates a lax attitude towards morality.

Meanwhile, my philosophy was: take advantage of those golden years when your ass supports itself.

But as time goes by, I've changed my mind. My interest in nice underwear - and in general, in nice clothes - has waned a lot this year. If before I viewed shopping with fanatical, frothing-at-the-wallet enthusiasm, this year I'm a lot more restrained. I walk by stores and don't go in.

And the underwear is the same. Maybe my market is saturated. I have so many damn clothes that I no longer have space or energy to acquire something new. Or maybe it's something else. I wouldn't call it maturity, but maybe it's the passing of a phase.

In high school, I was content with two pairs of shoes, both of them sneakers, which I wore everyday in the belief that should terrorists/lunatics/dogs attack me, I'd better be ready to run. I also owned several skirts so short I can't look at them - much less wear them - ever again. And a whole lot of random T-shirts. One of my best friends once called me "fashion challenged," and she was being kind.

So for me, I figured this whole "buying cute crap" thing was a phase I'd eventually outgrow. I wonder if it's happening. Or maybe I'm just feeling more responsible, since a lingerie habit can leave a girl broke.

91.

I was looking at my high school graduation pictures the other day, and I realized that I look older. At first, I thought maybe it was wrinkles or pouches or some awful thing like that. My mother said it probably was. (She's very supportive.)

But then, over coffee, when I asked a friend if I looked older, she also said yes. And I asked, "Well, in a bad way?" And she answered, "God no, you're more experienced and intelligent now!"

I don't know whether either of those last things are true, but I prefer "experienced and intelligent" to "wrinkled and stooped"- and since neither is under par for reality, I'll go with the former.

My point is, there are all these articles about how women reach their "sexual peak" in their 30's, whereas men hit it in their late teens, and the general takeaway from all this overanalysis is not a clear definition of what that ridiculous phrase even means but the sad conclusion that what is sauce for the goose will never be sauce for the gander.

Meanwhile, plenty of columnists (and by "plenty" I mean, that chimera of the NYTimes, Maureen Dowd) lament that women get worse-looking with age, whereas men only get better. But I think the more enlightening comment in this whole debate comes halfway down Dowd's column, where one Democratic aide says, "we've been staring at aging white men since the beginning of the democracy."

To get more equal opportunity about it, if we start staring at aging white women (and then, whoa, aging women of color and then, you know, whatever frontier could possibly exist after that) I suspect this attitude will go the way of the Whig Party. After all, in scientific theory, men are as likely as women to get less viable over time. (Or at least, to produce aneuploid offspring, aneuploid being a fancy term for "chromosomally abnormal" which is a fancy term for "special" which is a condescending term for...well, there's really no good way to say it, but if you've ever witnessed/borne/been the child of an older man you might know what I mean.) And of course, my favorite blog has a whole 'nother reason for why women prefer older men.

In an old interview with Cosmopolitan, Eva Longoria said that she felt more confident as a woman in her thirties than a woman in her twenties, and it extended to her sex life (I'm actually classing up Cosmo's dialogue - this is obviously a world of class away from the interview where she told Rolling Stone that the best sex she'd had all year was with her vibrator.) And this is no doubt because in her thirties Eva was starring in a hit prime-time drama, whereas in her twenties she was...even Imdb doesn't know what she was doing. And the two are not unrelated.

Meanwhile, on my favorite prime-time drama, the main character (with whom I uncomfortably identify) is a former conservative talk show host turned campaign advisor who just married a Senator. In the most recent episode, it comes out that her three brothers were betting on when she would get married, and the earliest estimate was 35. "Let's be honest - no one ever thought this would happen," is the common refrain, which makes sense to everyone, including the viewer.

Age carries a physical stigma for women because it degrades our most valuable resource. But I wonder if that matters anymore. I wonder if, in a mere fifty years, it will matter at all. In Ocean's 13, Matt Damon's character tries to seduce Ellen Barkin's older 'cougar' character. The days of older women lacking power, personality and opportunity are over. And I think the days of older women having no appeal of their own - no growing individuality, no keener sense of their place in the world as time goes by - are ending also.

Maureen Dowd, who for all her fire-haired feminist enthusiasm is still a conventionally pretty woman (and always has been) probably has trouble understanding this second, more Michelle-Obama-type allure. But Michelle - who seduced and married Barack back when he was just the office skintern - is not an example to ignore. Until he ran for the presidency, she almost overshadowed her husband, and reporters the country over have been salivating after her since she first appeared on the candidate's arm. She has a magnetism reflected not in what people write about her, but the fact that they do it so often, and with such enthusiasm (and I'm including myself, here.)

Nice teeth, nice skin, nice hair, these are all great. But there is no attractive power on earth that is greater (in my opinion) than intellectual force. And we're fortunate that we no longer live in an environment where women can't develop that.

90.

In the course of my day (which includes: eating, visiting with friends, sleeping, reading, job searching, editing and yoga - this list makes me sound far more productive than I am) I found this amazing website. It's like Photoshop, for people who have no fucking clue how to use Photoshop (Don't be ashamed if you're one of these people. I still have trouble with 'layers.'). I gave myself various makeovers, which I can't post in the website's gallery (one of the conditions of posting there is that these not be facetious, and mine are, ahem, facetious) but which are still frightening.

Here I am:
Looking like Lance Bass (or, Sanjaya, once he figures out how to grow facial hair and chops off those Hanson-esque locks)(Ignore that weird hair boa around my neck - it's a remnant of the shot I originally cropped.)

Here I am, channeling Mary Jane Watson.

Yikes. And finally here I am, as a stylish Communist sympathizer, or a French exchange student with an accessories fetish.

And that's enough time wasted. The most amusing part of this entire episode is how the photos capture "before and after" shots. The Flash technology is pretty sophisticated, but I can't imagine how anyone could benefit from this kind of impersonal online butchering.

On another note, though, I think I have my holiday cards for this year. I am thinking of replacing the message on the little note with something like:

"Dear XXX,

I know it's been a while since we last met, but I wanted to let you know that I've undergone sex reassignment/assumed a fake identity/joined the People's Movement. I thought it was time for a change. Hope to see you soon, and please drop me a line if you're ever in Vegas/incarcerated/atop the Great Wall. It'd be great to catch up!

Happy Holidays!

Your friend,
A.

P.S. Let's not lose touch again!"

89.

So. There I was, in a stranger's house, speaking a foreign language, wearing unfamiliar clothes, and in general trying not to make an ass of myself. The subject of conversation - which I could barely follow, anyway - turned to Indian history. People were debating what point in time, exactly, could be considered the beginning of the Indian Independence Movement.

"A lot of scholars trace the Indian Independence Movement to the Sepoy Mutiny," I said knowledgeably, in "Hindi." (Something like, "Indian Independence Movement vo Sepoy Mutiny se shuru hua) The conversation ground to a halt. For the third time that day (the first being when I tripped on my chuni and nearly brained myself, the second when I refused a second cup of tea) people looked at me as if I were a specimen from another planet.

I couldn't speak to my parents over the phone (no connection) but much later on I told my uncle this story. He started laughing uproariously. "You said that?" he demanded, wiping tears from his eyes. I bristled at the suggestion that I'd done something wrong. "In general," he informed me, "Indian people think 'Sepoy Mutiny' is a denigrating, racist and colonialist term." I gathered that in some academic circles, saying 'sepoy' is akin to using the n-word. "How could I have known that?" I protested.

How, indeed.

After all, I learned this term in IB World History. Shouldn't that count for something? As it turns out, it counts for squat. I still remember the first time I made a mistake like this. I was standing beneath a statue of Cervantes in the middle of Madrid. Our tour guide was talking - in Spanish, because I can't humiliate myself enough in my native tongue - about how Cervantes was one of Spain's greatest heroes.

"Yes, but he was a raving lunatic," I opined. I was repeating, word for word, a remark an English teacher had made to me in years past.

People might suggest that I run into these difficulties because I can't resist the urge to run my mouth, and they'd be right. But on the other hand, what's an education for, if you can't share it with others?

I mean, if someone showed up in my neighborhood and said, casually, that Abraham Lincoln was an illiterate, godless hick, I might be annoyed. (And if you're going to argue any of these points, remember that great story we learned as kids about how Honest Abe taught himself to read and write with a shovel and a piece of coal? How far can a man get with a shovel and a piece of coal? Exactly. Also, he never belonged to any religion. And in 1809, everyone was a hick.) But anyway - I'd be offended to hear it said.

I ran into these difficulties, ultimately, because I was speaking a language I didn't perfectly understand and repeating ideas taught to me by people who had a) never lived in the country b) didn't speak the language c) had no friends who grew up in that country d) had never read an entire book about the country and e) still felt qualified to teach about it.

I still remember my seventh grade Hinduism unit. My well-intentioned teacher taught us numerous fun facts about the religion. Upon later examination of the Gita and Vedas, almost every one of these facts turned out to be wrong.

But I'm making two separate points. The first is that not every word has the same weight everywhere, and this is especially true when dealing with history. And the other is that sometimes, the things we we are taught (particularly about small countries or unfamiliar religions) are just plain incorrect.

By the time I went to Italy, of course, I adopted a mandate I picked up in IB Philosophy: like Socrates, I decided that "all I knew was that I knew nothing." When the conversation around bars turned to great writers of modern Italy, I merely said, "How about that Umberto Eco?" with the best possible accent and a mysterious smile. Soon enough the expats and lit profs in the audience would be going at each other with salad forks. Afterwards the survivors (because believe me, these duels sometimes went to the death) said to me, "God, you're so smart for an American."

"We're a pretty smart people," I replied, and left it at that.

88.

Last night I found out my cousin is engaged. She's my age, and when we were kids she was the one who hung out with me and my sister in Hyderabad, she was the one who talked to cab drivers and tour givers, she was the one who haggled with cotton merchants and jewelry vendors. Thanks to her I got great deals on custom salwar kameezes, and thanks to her I had a friend when I went to India.

She's exactly my age - maybe a month older. Even though plenty of my girlfriends (read: sorority sisters) plan to get married right out of college, my cousin's announcement shook me in a way none of theirs did.

She met the boy through her family. She's probably talked to him for a total of an hour, he's older than she is, and he's a little bit bald. In spite of all this, I know for a fact it's what she wants. I know, also, that she'll be happy (because she's like that).

I dashed off a congratulatory email and then wandered up to my bedroom to try and concentrate on other things. But the truth is this: hearing about her decision made me question all of mine.

Everyone says she's being smart. Girls in our community marry young (20-24). They always have children before they're 30 (a goal many of my classmates claim but I suspect few will meet). My cousin has never traveled more than 50 miles from her hometown, she has an undergraduate degree, she's always lived at home.

But in the eyes of everyone I know, she's making the right choice. She'll get married, she'll get to know her husband for a few years, they'll have children, she'll be satisfied. The truth is that the old ideals of marriage and motherhood hold strong sway for all my relatives: even if she designed clothes for the Queen of England, if she was unmarried, everyone would assume she was unhappy.

All my cousins are getting married. And I wonder, as this happens, if there will come a point when I'll have nothing in common with them. When I'll stop seeing them to avoid inevitable conversations that lead nowhere good. When I'll think they did it right, and like everyone else I know, I should have lived life with a bit more of a plan. I've always been close to my family, and the thought is unpleasant.

But beyond my near-sighted self-pity (which I'll get over in a minute) it is true that it's getting harder to laugh and change the subject when my family members bring this up to me (and they do, a little too often.) I realize this is how most American woman feel, although maybe not when they're as young as me, and I also realize that...well, I'll say this in one breath - moving to Illinois was a bit of a romantic nonstarter for me.

There are a lot of reasons things worked out like this. I don't like living my life according to a predetermined set of rules, and of all the injunctions I disliked, the one I thought the most idiotic and small-minded was the recommendation that young Indians should only marry inside their community. (I won't say "race" since anyone with eyes and an encyclopedia will know that Indians are not, in any biological sense, a "race." Not that anyone is, in a biological sense, a race.) Returning to the main point, if I can belabor it: humans share 99.2 % of their genes with chimps. Considering this, I think we're all well enough off so long as we marry within our species.

I realize not everyone feels this way. But until I went to school, I assumed the only people who didn't feel this way were at least 80 years old, and born to an America before Brown vs. Board of Education.

Was I in for an awakening, or what.

I'll spare everyone the stories of the times I hauled my slack jaw off the floor when classmates casually - casually! - expressed the view that they only want mates of their own religion, class or creed. They must be joking, I thought. And went on my way.

I'll blame my parents for this. In spite of many, many opportunities, they never saw the need to tell me about the narrowness of the wider world. And this is all well and good, and not even a mistake.

By and large, the men I've been involved with at school are either black, Hispanic or South Asian. And when I say "by and large" I mean "exclusively," although this was not true before. The men I've met in bars and clubs - too many of those! - are the same. This was also not true before. Have I changed?

I'll confess something else unfashionable, and probably paranoid: when I meet white guys from the Midwest nowadays, I almost always write them off as not attracted to nonwhite women, unless they visibly demonstrate otherwise. It's self-limiting, I know. And I hate that I do it, even though plenty of other people would say it's not a bad strategy. It's not how I want to live my life.

Race blogger Candace Miller writes "I suspect that deep down many African American women don't believe that non-black men find them attractive." And her comment cuts to the heart of the 'marriage squeeze' question. It relates to the reason I gave up on buying fashion magazines. The international requirements for a model are that she be at least 5'10", an arbitration that means more than 99% of the world's Asian and Latina women will never participate in the industry. I grew tired of flipping through those pages in vain search of someone with my height, shape or coloring. Once, passing through Ohio, I saw a church bulletin board on which was written, "God doesn't believe in atheists." To which I could add, "Fashion magazines do not believe in Asian women." After a while, I started to feel entirely invisible.

Miller says the many African American women don't look outside the race because they're afraid of rejection. I know I am. And I also know that I'll get over this attitude. Leopards can't change their spots, I can't go from believing one thing (that people are similar) to another (people are fundamentally different based on their background.)

In the Bhagavad Gita, the battlefield revelations of Lord Krishna to the archer Arjuna, God identifies many ways in which men and women should be matched to each other. He says they should share their sense of dharma, a word that encompasses everything from service to others to physical health. In the Upanishads it is written, "Your soul is the whole world." Your soul, not your body.

When the Inupiat people of Barrow, Alaska, go out on a whale hunt, they don't ask God for success. They ask for strength for whatever lies ahead. When Arjuna went out to fight the Pandavas, he didn't ask to win. He asked only for justice, whatever that might be.

If all this amounts to, stems from, or relates to a crisis of faith, I want to adopt the attitude of the Inupiat. Unlike my cousin, who is marrying a nice boy of her own community chosen by her family at the age deemed most appropriate for marriage, I don't ask for success, and I don't want my life to be easy.

I only want greater wisdom to understand it, and greater courage (because I'm not proud of the attitude I've adopted here) for when it is not.